Some Thoughts on Birth Dearth

Ross Douthat’s most recent column is devoted to fretting about whether America is catching the “birth dearth” disease that has supposedly hobbled the economic performance (and hence the political and cultural clout) of Europe and, increasingly, East Asia. The column makes a number of arguments with which I am familiar, in many cases because I would have made them myself a decade ago. Many of these are now worth pushing back against, or at least qualifying. I’m no longer convinced at all that modestly-below-replacement fertility is a problem at all. Indeed, I suspect that, under contemporary conditions, that’s exactly what most developed countries should be aiming for.

Douthat mentions that American overall fertility has been boosted, historically, by immigrants, who exhibit higher fertility than natives. But it would be more accurate to say that immigrants exhibit higher fertility than otherwise-similar individuals who remained in their home countries. And the reason is straightforward: kids are expensive. Immigrants benefit economically, in general, from immigration (otherwise they wouldn’t come). Hence they can afford more kids than they could back home. But if back home in Seoul or London or Tel Aviv they would have had 1-2 kids, they don’t come to America and have 4-5; they come to America and have 2-3. By contrast, if, back in Mexico or Guatemala, they would have had 3 kids, they might very well have 4-5 kids in America, where there is more opportunity to improve one’s economic situation.

But fertility rates are falling rapidly across Latin America. They’re now below replacement in Brazil and Chile, and rapidly falling towards replacement in Mexico and Colombia. It would be very strange indeed if we didn’t see fertility among immigrants from these countries drop proportionately. If we want to maintain high levels of immigrant fertility, we will need not merely high levels of immigration, but high levels of immigration from countries with relatively high fertility – moving from Mexico to Peru, from Vietnam to the Philippines, and from much of the world to sub-Saharan Africa. But the baseline level of fertility is primarily driven by two factors related to development: the level of urbanization and the prevalence of female literacy. Even assuming we want to maintain high levels of fertility, is it optimal to do so by favoring immigration from countries that are significantly more rural and less-well-educated than America?

The baseline level of fertility seems to be driven primarily by development factors. Relative to that baseline, fertility rates seem to vary with economic factors. In countries where housing is very expensive and establishing oneself in a career takes a long time – like Italy and Japan – fertility is especially low. Similarly in countries – like much of the former Soviet bloc – where prices rose much more rapidly than incomes in the wake of economic liberalization. The United States has benefitted historically from relatively inexpensive housing, as Douthat points out, and to some extent the post-bubble reemergence of lending standards has something to do with the decline in fertility (along with rise in unemployment and in levels of bad consumer debt). But more persistent drags on fertility include wage stagnation and the rising cost of educational credentials. In any event, given our ongoing economic doldrums, a decline in fertility is to be expected. If that weren’t happening, we would have to be concerned that prospective parents seemed unconcerned with the poor economic outlook for their children.

Douthat is aware of all this, and argues for a more family-friendly tax system along with a more robust job market as ways to raise fertility. But he also assumes that we need higher fertility to maintain our collective well-being, and I increasingly question that.

The main argument why positive rates of population growth are good for individuals within an economy, and not just for the size of the pie as a whole, is a technical matter related to discounting investment in fixed assets. If you assume a rising population, then an up-front investment in infrastructure seems much more likely to be paid back than if you assume a static or shrinking population, because while, on the one hand, a bridge will wear out with time, on the other hand the value of the bridge will keep going up because more and more people depend on it economically. A declining population can give you Detroit, a shrinking tax base less and less capable of maintaining the existing infrastructural base.

But I think this is mostly a technical problem rather than an economic law. Rapidly rising populations create an incentive to invest in less-durable infrastructure, because we know that in the future we will be able to afford to replace whatever we’ve built with something newer, and better. If we assumed a static or slowly declining population, we’d have an incentive to invest in structures less-likely to require replacement – because maintenance will be “more expensive” in the future than it is today (because workers will be more scarce, and hence more expensive). It’s not obvious that, net of environmental externalities, the latter choice makes us less-wealthy on average. As for Detroit, it experienced a precipitous drop in population. There’s no reason to assume that a modest and slow decline over time would mean Detroitization of the country.

As for discount factors: this is really an artifact of the “zero bound” which, in turn, is an artifact of physical cash. If you have a declining population, you will probably eventually reach a point where labor force contraction outweighs productivity gains, and you have declining real aggregate economic growth. That, in turn, creates a problem for investment returns – without the prospect of positive returns, why take risk? why not just stay in cash? – which in turn would seem likely to feed back into reduced productivity growth in an acceleratingly-negative cycle. But really the only reason there’s a problem at all is that cash has a yield of zero. If there were no such thing as physical cash, then overnight instruments, in such a situation, would naturally have a negative nominal yield – and suddenly investments that broke even over a long time horizon would look perfectly attractive. And we are very close to the point where eliminating physical cash is a very real policy option.

Even without eliminating physical cash, the evidence from Japan over the past twenty years is that you can have stagnating fertility, and stagnating overall economic growth, while still experiencing rapidly-rising standards of living. That being the case, we should question the assumption that a society that is relatively static population-wise – as most human societies have been for most of human history – would also become progressively poorer.

The biggest problem Japan has is that they have too many old people. This is partly a function of rapidly-rising longevity, which cannot be solved by increasing fertility. Trying to raise fertility in response to increases in longevity is a formula for accelerating population growth, because those young people will eventually (one hopes) grow old to become an even larger contingent of dependent elderly. Moreover, this isn’t what we observe in any developed country today. The problem of longevity can only be solved either by extending one’s working life beyond historic norms, or by advances in productivity that make it possible to maintain a large dependent population on a smaller workforce, or by reduced overall standards of living. Inasmuch as Japan currently has a transition problem (until longevity stops increasing and/or fertility picks up to closer to replacement and/or it achieves rapid advances in productivity), the most obvious solution is to export its elderly to retirement colonies in countries with a large and substantially under-employed youthful labor force, such as India.

After looking at and fretting about these economic drivers, Douthat talks about a cultural shift away from “child-centered” family life, but again I suspect he’s got causality backwards. How “child-centered” was family life in the 18th century, the period when children were apprenticed out as soon as they were old enough to physically manage the work? And yet, this was a period of phenomenal fertility in America – because arable land was extraordinarily cheap. Douthat tracks a change from 1990 to 2007 in people’s attitudes toward the importance of children for a successful marriage, but American fertility hasn’t declined precipitously since 1990; it has fluctuated around a relatively stable level since the mid-1970s. Instead, what’s happened is that the culture has, over time, adjusted to the way people are actually living. And they are living with smaller families, on average.

That “on average” is important. One of America’s strengths remains our comfort with a diversity of sub-cultures. One consequence of this diversity, however, has been something of a “sort” into relatively homogeneous groups who don’t always understand one another, or want to. Fertility is one of the principal axes of division. The childless people I know tend to hang around with other childless people; the people I know with large families tend to hang around with people people with large families – which, in turn, has fueled a move by some toward a more traditional religious orientation precisely to find a community that is culturally supportive of a large families. The result is that what looks to Richard Florida like the engine of the economy looks to David Brooks like an epiphenomenon, when of course in fact we have only one economy, to which both the “creative class” and “patio man” make their unique contributions.

Which makes it all the more unfortunate that Douthat describes that adjustment in near-apocalyptic terms:

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

That’s a funny diagnosis when you look at the data. The countries that are the least-dynamic and that are most-opposed to innovation – countries like Afghanistan and Yemen – are also the countries with the highest fertility rates in the world. Moreover, the list of countries with the highest global savings rates – which, you would think, would be evidence of a future-oriented outlook rather than a decadent, present-oriented one – is dominated by old-fashioned European states like Germany and France, Belgium and Austria, Sweden and Switzerland. And swamping them all is China, where extraordinarily high rates of savings – and a rapid march into the future – has accompanied (and may have been driven by) a sharp decline in fertility driven by the one-child policy. Finally, maybe it’s just because I live in Park Slope, but I haven’t noticed that we live in a civilization that has retreated from child-rearing.

It may be that civilization itself leads inevitably to decadence – Ibn Khaldun certainly thought so – but that’s not the kind of thinking that leads to speculation about how “pro-family” tax policy might help America turn the corner, nor even about how “individual choices” can eventually “turn the tide.” Eventually, the desert will cover all.

In the meantime, allow me to take a very long view. In the history of life on earth, humanity conquered the globe in the blink of an eye. Then human population growth slowed down, until the invention of agriculture. This made possible another huge leap in human populations, and much conflict – until, once again, the population stabilized at a certain rough level. Then the industrial revolution made possible another huge leap in human populations, again accompanied by much instability. Human family structure changed dramatically after each leap, and then settled down into new, relatively stable forms.

We may or may not be at the beginning of another period of relative population stability. I rather hope we are, and that the kinds of trends Douthat worries about are signs of adaptation to that state, to be appreciated as such. It may be that the more pessimistic ecologists are right, and we cannot afford stability – we need to shrink, and quickly, if we are to survive at all. I hope they are wrong. But it strikes me as very strange to identify stability with “decadence” and “exhaustion.”

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30 Responses to Some Thoughts on Birth Dearth

While your note makes a lot sense more than Ross doom and gloom, I feel in the long term the lower of fertility can not be a good thing and it is going to be a major impact on Japan. It seems development has a Catch-22, that a country (say Ireland or China) can not accelerate economically without lowering its birth rate (women can join and compete in the workforce and families can use resources outside of caring for the large family), then once it has developed it becomes too expensive to have children. I wonder when robots and driverless car do everything for us, we will have more time to populate the world.

Of course the decrease in the US birth rate is coming from single mothers. Ross is biggest flaw in his argument is the birth rate is lowering for the right rational reasons.

Collin, it really is a Catch-22 in that situation. Check out some of the data on Hans Rosling, particular in TED. He’s been stating this decline for some time and, considering how oversized our world population is, is a good thing, especially on why.

Basically, high birth rates come from low health resources (picture the idea of having 10 kids just to get 2 to survive), women’s rights (working and living live vs baby factory) and poverty. As all three factors improve, you start off seeing a baby boom, mostly caused by those 10 kids surviving and everyone loving it, followed by a drop in child birth. Whether it’s done in force, like China, or just naturally created like the UK and US, it’s pretty much a constant case. Even countries like India and certain African countries are showing the same trends. Wealth, care, and women’s rights = lower birth rates. Removing all three = higher rates.

As far as improving the birth rates, if you want to, probably the best would be finding ways for people to just settle down. Two income households means insane child care prices and the simple “we aren’t there for the kids” feeling. individuals are spending their ‘child bearing’ days in education or trying to get into their careers or recovering from a lost career, or establishing their household. The idea of just sitting in a settled home and career (not content but sure of the direction by just doing what you’re doing now) just doesnt’ exist. Neither does having regular vacation days or just regular 40 or less hours to have time with your family.

We basically have crowded out the concept of having kids. No time, no energy, no room.

Now, while I’m all for improving those situations, I DON’T see the decrease as a bad thing. I see it as a good thing that causes some major bumps along the way. I’m with Hans that we should promote prosperity so that all nations can go through the same cycle and, thus, end up with lower rates. As the population shrinks, the market should balance, though it may need help to handle the changes (i.e. the top heavy populations in the meanwhile). If it can’t, we’ll use Public methods to encourage more free time and less stress.

“It would be very strange indeed if we didn’t see fertility among immigrants from these countries drop proportionately.”

But, have we?

The Total Fertility Rate in Mexico dropped from, say, 5 in 1975 to 2.5 by 2005, but the Total Fertility Rate of Mexican immigrants in America didn’t drop proportionally. Indeed, it climbed from 1985 to 2005, when it hit a reported 3.7 in the state of California. People moved from Mexico to America to have more kids than they could afford to have in their own country.

Massive immigration from Mexico looked like a winning strategy for wealthy Americans because the Mexican newcomers weren’t much competition for American elites. They consumed a lot from American companies, but they didn’t create much new competition for existing American firms. So, American leaders reasoned, what’s not to like?

Latino populations haven’t dropped for similar reasons why the US only started their drop after the 50s: old habits die hard and wealth hasn’t reached them yet. As the latino community integrates into American culture, they will start with a baby boom, similar to how the rest of the country did in the 50s. A generation later, the community will settle down and fall into the same birth rate drop everyone else is doing.

Jeesh, it’s happening in every developed nation. Every developing nation, meanwhile, is showing the same ‘boom to bust’ cycle the developed nations have done. The only nations that haven’t done it or started to do it are 3rd world nations. The few that have found ways to improve themselves…have started the trend.

The only way you’ll see Latinos buck the trend is if we manage to completely lock them to poverty status and segregate them to keep them from assimilating. If either element doesn’t occur, either the push for wealth or the taking in of American culture will drive them towards the same cycle. Watch for attempts to do just that, btw.

“But it strikes me as very strange to identify stability with “decadence” and “exhaustion.”

Exactly. But heaven forbid that my (2) children should inherit a less crowded, less polluted, less plundered and used up world. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” ( – Edward Abbey).

Not trying to be obtuse, but is this satire? “, the most obvious solution is to export its elderly to retirement colonies in countries with a large and substantially under-employed youthful labor force, such as India.”

If individual couples move to Mexico to spread out their retirement dollar, that’s wonderful.

Incentivizing a septuagenarian exodus to the developing world, and depending on that to subsidize 1st world retirements, replace 1st world health care, for the bonus of consuming a few dollars, euros, and yen?

“Latino populations haven’t dropped for similar reasons why the US only started their drop after the 50s: old habits die hard and wealth hasn’t reached them yet.”

Actually, the fertility rate for Mexican-born women in the U.S. has dropped 23% since the subprime Bubble in 2007, a much steeper decline than for other groups. Housing bubbles stimulate fertility among unwed illegal aliens and depress it among married white Americans. That’s a lesson we need to learn.

The recent book by Jorge G. Castaneda, the former Mexican foreign secretary, suggested a long list of steps to make Mexico more attractive to American retirees, such as installing traffic lights at more intersections so doddering Americans can feel like they’ll make it across the street alive. Most important, he felt, was that Mexicans should stop referring to Americans by the ethnic slur “pinches gringos,” or even just “gringos.” Dropping this ethnic animus against Americans would help Mexicans learn from their more successful neighbor, Castaneda argued.

Hmm could there be another reason why a conservative might express some regret about declines in the number of families and family-size? Maybe the orientation toward the role of government differs between singles and married couple with no children as opposed to married couples with larger families? If that’s the case and you believe that on the whole families with children will take a longer run view regarding the national debt and the importance of maintaining cultural norms that emphasize virtuous behavior over libertinism you would lament changes in family formation and structure. We know from the exit polls that married women vote significantly different from single women and that single men also differ but by a lesser degree from married men in their political preferences. To the extent that the percentage of unmarried (and increasingly childless) voters increases year over year in the electorate this would seem to be hazardous to conservative politics. When you live on a middle-class income and lack the money to insulate your kids from cultural decline it’s hard to be a liberal. It’s an intellectual posture that works when you are either childless, well-to-do or on the government dole.

” Maybe the orientation toward the role of government differs between singles and married couple with no children as opposed to married couples with larger families?”

That’s what the theories are hinting. For example, increase of singles means less family resources to aid during troubling times. As one theory put it, without being able to find help, they will turn to anyone who can give them that help.

Suddenly “I am from the Government. I am here to help” isn’t so scary, especially when they leave you with a way out of starving to death.

In fact, that helps explain my own beliefs. I believe that it would be best if charities and small groups could help those on the lower end instead of some big government. However, I know that those programs cannot do that job: otherwise, they would be as big as the government. Telling people to rely on their friends or family sort of assumes you have a strong network of people with resources, which is not a good assumption.

Well connected people can use local resources. For the rest of us, there’s Uncle Sam.

That’s just one example as well.

“When you live on a middle-class income and lack the money to insulate your kids from cultural decline it’s hard to be a liberal.”

When you live on a middle-class income and find that the biggest pay issue isn’t taxes, but the lack of wages to pay for food for your kids, it’s hard NOT to be a Liberal.

Something tells me that the second event happens far more often than the first.

If… you believe that on the whole families with children will take a longer run view regarding… the importance of maintaining cultural norms that emphasize virtuous behavior over libertinism you would lament changes in family formation and structure.

This is precisely wrong. Families with children today are more apt to support marriage equality and sexual diversity. Why? Because more and more of those families’ sons and daughters are coming out of the closet. Even if a family doesn’t have a gay or lesbian child, chances are their kids have gay and lesbian friends. The scary stereotypes, fear-mongering slanders and doom-saying nonsense peddled by anti-gay groups simply don’t hold water anymore – gay and lesbian people aren’t boogeymen, they’re friends, relatives, colleagues, senators, husbands, wives and children.

These arguments from economic statistics leave out a more fundamental question of why openness to many children (in principle – I am not talking about specific instances) is important in terms of how man ought to live. Marriage is inextricably tied up with having kids, unless you want to redefine what marriage is. Humanae Vitae has interesting things to say on these topics.

Travis, the argument about gay people not being scary really doesn’t say anything about what marriage is and what it is for.

I always find it remarkable how much race comes up in the discussions on TAC. It’s a bit unsettling, but more honest in a sense I suppose. It’s nice to see the underbelly of humanity from time to time.

As to this whole birth dearth business, I doubt that the U.S. would be immune to the demographic shift. It’s resisted the strong shift seen elsewhere in the rich world until now, but to that all I have to say is what I’ve said before, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

As for immigrants to keep up birth rates, well that hasn’t really worked in my country. Our immigration rates are higher (much much higher) than they are in the States. No change in birthrates. No real race backlash yet either, though some of the more rabid anti-immigrant, pro white sentiment, that all TAC readers would be familiar with has started cropping up.

No doubt, interesting times lie ahead of us. As for the birth dearth, I’m not too worried. What has me worried is the death of trees. They are dying at rates 10 times greater than normal. That is worrying and speaks to a far more threatening “decadence” than American birthrates falling temporarily due to economic disruption.

@the Wet one
“As for immigrants to keep up birth rates, well that hasn’t really worked in my country. Our immigration rates are higher (much much higher) than they are in the States. No change in birthrates. ”

Well, when I said about immigration being a ‘solution’ I meant constantly bringing in immigrants to keep up the population, not bringing them in to have babies. Once immigrants assimilate, they take up the same baby issues as the original natives. Latinos in the US, who are stereotyped as having big families, are starting this.

…hmm, that means that Latinos will NOT become the #1 demographic of the country, since it’s based on them keeping up their birthrates. It’ll be enough to take whites out of Supermajority, but not push them into majority.

“The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion”

But yes, it is. Anyone who has spent any length of time with childless-by-choice couples knows this. They are most dreadfully banal and only superficially happy. The sad, hopeless monotony, the sheer lack of ceremonies and rituals of civilization of a sense of belonging to anyone but each other – and woe to the one which dies last!

(I am aware that some couples are childless entirely not through their own choice. I have met some who nevertheless make an effort to reach out and give to their communities. People who refuse to perpetuate humanity are not in the same frame of mind.)

I hope that they and all the deracinated materialists who choose to spend their declining years on perpetual holiday with peers in Costa Rica instead of in the company of family and longtime friends – the sorts of people to whom they would still mean much and still have much to offer even as they become senile – don’t get too depressed about their directionless and lonely existences first on the beach and then in rest homes.

Douthat pushing for more subsidies does not however make much sense. People will produce more children when they understand how much more there is to love and appreciate about life than material existence and how wonderful it is to share and transmit this abundance. So long as we perpetuate the sort of community-breaking commodity-driven life patterns described above – not just in retirement, but right away from birth – people will continue abort, contraceive, and commit suicide in droves.

It’s pretty amazing to read an article like this without the slightest mention of how positive the global decline in birth rates is for conserving dwindling global resources. Why are American conservatives so clueless as to global environmental trends?

Many of the arguments advanced by the “hooray for fewer of us” crowd are both questionable factually as well as politically tendentious. A world of dwindling resources? Global food production has been rising steadily for decades, and outstripping human population growth. Energy supply discoveries and new technologies have kept energy prices low despite population expansion, and there is a growing consensus that discoveries in North America promise lower future prices. Resources dwindle in some areas but expand in others, and human innovation finds new solutions constantly. You all need to read less UN population control, market regulation, energy suppression environmental alarmist propaganda.

And on the other hand consider that globally and historically wealth is concentrated in areas of high, not low, population density. Excepting the occasional Bangladesh outlier, almost of the world’s wealthiest areas are among it’s most densely populated. Fewer trees is a problem, but fewer people is just grand? Wait and see what happens over the next three decades in Germany, Japan and other gerontocracies to the cost of goods and services, and how that affects the state of political liberty.

Keep in mind, that the drop in fertility rate is partially a good thing. In previous times, the mortality rate for babies and children was very high. You might have 7 kids and only see 2 survive into adulthood. Today, that’s not the case. Advances in medicine give all babies and children a nice chance at life. The largest cause of death for American children is pediatric cancer which kills 2,300 kids and teens a year. Today, people can have 2 children and remained reassured that those 2 children will most likely grow up without the fear of diseases we had back in the early-mid 1900’s.

Noah Millman’s observations fall short of ALL factors. He talks about how Japan has (basically) survived almost a quarter century of stagnation. He says that rising fertility rates won’t help, because you’ll still have lots of old people. His reasoning is wrong headed. Japan’s national debt has risen so that it is around 2.5 times its annual GDP, by far the highest in the world.

Japan could use a HUGE boost in babies, for a very prolonged period of time. This would save Japan, whereas Japan, demographically and economically, is dying!

Current American citizens need to have many more babies than they are. Unless and until they do, allowing poor latinos to do so for us is about our only semi-solution. Of course, it creates many problems while solving others. But if natives don’t self-reproduce, someone needs to.

David P. Goldman (aka Spangler) in 2009 wrote an excellent piece called “Demographics & Depression”. You can Google and read it. He shows how have too few babies makes demand in an economy skeewompus. Too few young folks to do what young folks do in an economy. Certainly, demand for everything from homes to borrowing, etc, grows ever more out of synch with supply of same. This causes any national economy to tank.

Analyzing replacement (or sub-replacement) birth rates shows one big thing. They either go up or they go down. They seldom stay the same.

And sub-replacement birth rates are economy killers. You can’t grow and economy without first growing population. It’s impossible.

The fight for majority vs. minority is the real subject. White birth rates have declined while birth rates for people of color have risen. So this is an issue for white America. American will attempt to open the flood gates for immigrants but only for those who are not people of color and relabeled them as white to fake the numbers.